The Life of Senna

by Rubython, Tom

  The Brazilian also knew that Williams number two Damon Hill would be keen to get his first victory at his home Grand Prix. Although the same age as Senna, Hill was driving only his fifth Formula One race and he had lucked into the best car on the grid. In third was Formula One’s newest star, Michael Schumacher. To beat the German it would be imperative to get the upper hand early as his car could rev 1,500rpm higher. Senna’s plan was to pounce on his opponents before they got into a rhythm and control the race from the front, being the only man with a clear track and clear vision.

  He doubted whether any of the drivers in front would have a serious plan for this race, bar keeping their cars on the track. But that was their way. The Senna way was different. It was what made him the greatest of his time. The parade lap revealed the challenge the drivers were to face. The undulating circuit was waterlogged in the dips and slippery on the crests. It would be all too easy to make a mistake and end up in the gravel. As Senna slotted his car on to fourth on the grid the atmosphere was tense.

  As the lights changed to green the field was obliterated in a cloud of spray. Spectators could see nothing and only TV viewers had any real idea what was going on.

  Prost was the one man unaffected by the spray and took off into the lead with Hill sticking to his tail, probably following pre-arranged team orders. Senna was blocked by Schumacher and it was Karl Wendlinger’s Sauber that went past both of them into Redgate Corner to take third. No one had expected that.

  Senna was totally out of position and found himself alongside team-mate Michael Andretti, in danger of dropping to sixth. Somehow he held on, and as the cars screamed into the treacherous right-hander at Redgate he moved clear of his team-mate and on to Schumacher’s tail. As they exited the corner Senna got the power down better and moved alongside. Schumacher employed his usual tactics and squeezed him, forcing him to put a wheel off the track. Undeterred, Senna blasted past. One down, three to go.

  Wendlinger was next. As they went through Hollywood and into the daunting high-speed downhill sweepers of the Craner Curves, Senna and Wendlinger were side by side, Senna on the inside. Neither man gave way as they dived through the curves, but at the bottom was the Old Hairpin and everyone knew that only one car could go through that at a time. Senna was still on the inside, so Wendlinger had to give way.

  The Sauber driver said afterwards: “I saw him in the mirrors and I could see the way he was driving. I knew his reputation in the wet and I knew precisely what he was going to do. I decided I’d better leave some room. I didn’t want to go out of the race there and then.” Still half a lap remaining and only another two cars to go. Hill was the Brazilian’s next target. Senna said afterwards: “I had to put the car on the wet side to overtake and I knew I couldn’t delay.” He caught Hill as they headed under Starkey’s Bridge and up the rise, but the Englishman managed to stay ahead there and as they went through McLeans. However, after the short straight and into the righthander at Coppice, Senna went for the inside.

  Hill recalls it clearly: “I made a bad start. I actually thought I could get ahead of Alain into Redgate and I was a bit peeved to be behind him. I couldn’t really see and my concern was to stick with him and hopefully we’d pull away. You can’t see what’s going on behind you: you see there’s a car behind, and you might just make it out as a red car or a white car or something, but you don’t know which until it’s alongside. I might have fought the corner but it was very early in the race for a risk like that. When he got past me I thought: ‘For God’s sake, Ayrton!’ Then I thought, ‘Hold him up, Alain. Make sure you don’t let him get ahead’.”

  As Senna accelerated out and down the main straight, behind him Wendlinger and Andretti collided in the spray. Prost was now only a ball of spray ahead. Senna began to close the gap rapidly. He knew that given an equal car he could lap much faster than the Frenchman on pure driving skill. And in the wet, the balance was firmly in the Brazilian’s favour.

  Prost was ahead as they went through the Esses on to the new Melbourne Loop – but Senna had planned his move. As they raced down the short straight to the Melbourne Hairpin he dived for the inside line. Prost was forced to decide: give way or collide with the McLaren. Senna knew the answer before he made the move. He took the lead. He exited Goddards and crossed the start-finish line once again, this time 0.698 seconds in front.

  The crowd rose to their feet. Most had not seen much of the lap and were astonished to find the Brazilian out in front – especially those on the entrance to Redgate who had last seen him battling not to fall back to sixth. The tens of millions watching on TV had seen the finest and most exciting lap they would ever witness.

  Millions of Brazilians went berserk; the rest of the world was silent in awe. On the pitwall Ian Harrison, the plain-speaking Williams team manager for Prost and Hill that day, looked around in astonishment and frustration. “Why are we bothering?” The race had been won after only 1m 35.843secs. There would never be a greater lap in the history of Formula One.

  In the post-race press conference Prost blamed various problems during the race for his poor performance. Senna simply asked him if he wanted to swap cars. Prost was embarrassed into silence.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Secret IndyCar Test

  Senna sizzles in the desert

  Ayrton Senna did not sign a contract to drive for McLaren in 1993, until well into the mid-season. The simple reason was that he didn’t want to drive for the team. The loss of the works Honda engine meant 1993 would confine him to also-ran status in another year of Williams dominance, this time with his arch-enemy Alain Prost. But all options were closed to him in Formula One and it was McLaren or nothing. The latter was a real option – in fact he thought about taking a year off. He also thought of switching to Indianapolis-type racing in the American CART series, a move Nigel Mansell had already announced for 1993. It was a serious option.

  Senna’s good friend, two-time world champion Emerson Fittipaldi, had retired from Formula One and taken up IndyCar racing with great success. He drove for the Roger Penske-owned team and had been trying to persuade Senna to test an IndyCar for several years.

  Fittipaldi had a special place in Ayrton Senna’s story. It was he who had first introduced Senna to Formula One in the early 1980s, and introduced him to the famous team principals as an up-and-coming star.

  When the pair met up in São Paulo at the beginning of December 1992, he put the idea to him again. Senna decided to take up his offer and Fittipaldi immediately picked up the phone to his team boss Roger Penske to make the necessary arrangements.

  Penske was not just any CART team. Since the championship had been instituted in 1979, Penske drivers had taken the title on six occasions and the team had a reputation as the best. In 1992 Fittipaldi had taken four victories in the car, and was one of the favourites for the 1993 title. Penske also had historically close links to McLaren, aided by the Marlboro title sponsorship that both cars carried. For Senna, it was the perfect opportunity.

  The Brazilian was adamant that the test should be kept a secret, away from media attention, quashing any theories that it was for publicity reasons alone, to pressure Ron Dennis into paying him more in 1993. Before the cars arrived in Arizona, the only people who were told of the plans were those essential in setting the test up.

  Besides Senna, Fittipaldi and Roger Penske, also officially in on the secret were Marlboro sponsorship chief John Hogan, Penske team manager Chuck Sprague in the US and Penske managing director Nick Goozée at the English factory in Poole, Dorset. There was also a mysterious nameless Senna ally at McLaren, probably Jo Ramirez, who arranged for his equipment to be sent to Poole.

  Goozée recalls: “Emerson spoke to Ayrton and between them they agreed the best time to go through with the test. Emerson called me and told me that it was going to go ahead. We knew that there would be a lot of media interest in it, so we made sure it was a secret – we didn’t even tell people within the team. Emerson told me Ayrton would get in to
uch, which he did. He called to say that his helmet and everything was on its way to me and he was looking forward to driving a Penske. I had Ayrton’s helmet on my desk for a day before it was shipped to the test. Inside the visor was a note from someone at McLaren saying ‘Please don’t do it Ayrton!’ so the secret was less than it was supposed to be!”

  The test in Phoenix was arranged for Sunday 20th December, to coincide with the first shakedown of Penske’s 1993 challenger. The team would be testing across town on the city’s oval track for three days before Senna’s test, prior to moving on to Firebird West to give the new car its first run.

  Phoenix, Arizona has its own place in motorsport history. It was around the city’s street circuit that Jean Alesi boldly re-overtook Ayrton Senna for the lead in the 1990 United States Grand Prix, and where in 1991 Mika Häkkinen and Jordan Grand Prix made their Formula One debuts. The city’s international oval hosted the first-ever round of the CART championship in 1979. The slow and twisting Firebird West track is not so well remembered, and was then mainly used for smaller events.

  Emerson Fittipaldi flew out from Brazil with Senna to Arizona. As he recalls: “We arranged to go out there for four days. Roger didn’t want him to drive on the oval, so he watched my testing at the oval then he went to test for himself at the road course.”

  Goozée says: “The team didn’t know he was going to be testing until he turned up. He didn’t appear until the end of the test and always maintained it was to give him the specific opportunity to drive an IndyCar. Obviously everyone was surprised to see him. There weren’t many people about, but there were a couple of photographers. Over the next week there were pictures in the worldwide motorsport media of him sitting in the car.”

  The test was less secret than intended. Among the Penske team personnel, rumours had already begun to spread that Senna would be coming to test the car before he arrived at the track. Nigel Beresford, Penske’s head of engineering, remembers: “When we were testing at the oval we heard rumours that he would go out to the oval to test – which I thought was an extremely bad idea because there’s so little room for error. So we knew there was something going on. After the test some freelance journalists phoned us up because they were annoyed that we hadn’t tipped them off. It definitely created some interest.”

  Senna, in the company of John Hogan of Marlboro, quietly watched Fittipaldi drive the one-mile oval before the team headed to the road course on the other side of town for the following day. It was arranged that Fittipaldi would first take out the 1992 chassis, the Penske Chevrolet PC21, before Senna himself got his first taste of Indy racing.

  Nigel Beresford explains: “Firebird West is a small Mickey Mouse track out in the desert just to the south-east of Phoenix, and is nothing like as grandiose as its name implies. Normally when we’ve built a new car we take it out there to give it the first run. As I recall it was a pretty nice day – at that time of year Arizona is typically nice and sunny and warm without any of the really high temperatures you get in the summer. The weather in the northern half of the United States is so unpredictable in the winter that the only sensible places to go and test in December are in California, Florida and Arizona. Besides Emerson, our other two drivers were also present: Paul Tracy and Rick Mears, who had just stunned us all by completely unexpectedly announcing his retirement at the Penske Racing Christmas party 10 days earlier.”

  It went unsaid among the team, but the departure of the three-time CART champion Mears had left a space to fill. To some observers, the timing of Senna’s test seemed more than coincidental.

  At 11am Fittipaldi took to the track in the PC21 as Senna looked on. After spinning on cold tyres on his out-lap, he soon began to set respectable times, and after coming in for new tyres, clocked a best lap of 49.7 seconds. At 12.55pm, it was over to Senna.

  Beresford says: “It was everything you wanted it to be. He was very charismatic and had an aura about him. He just got in the car and set off around the track. He set off very slowly, learning the track and getting acclimatised to the different seating position and cockpit of the car. He wasn’t very comfortable using a conventional gearshift again – most Formula One cars by this time were running steering-wheel mounted paddles so it had been a while since he’d had to change gear in that way. He’d never driven a car with a sequential manual shift either. He kept losing his way in the gearbox so would slow down, shift back down into first gear and then start off again. He couldn’t tell what gear he was in, and his ear wasn’t tuned to the engine so he couldn’t tell what revs he was pulling. We left the same tyres on as Emerson had used and after 15 laps on the same – by now well used – tyres, he bettered Fittipaldi’s time by 0.2 seconds, which was pretty amazing.”

  After the first 16 laps, Senna returned to the pits to give his opinion of the car to the team. Beresford says: “The first thing he said when he came into the pits was that he didn’t know what gear he was in and he hadn’t calibrated his hearing so he didn’t know when he should shift. Ayrton was very complimentary about the engine response and driveability. He said that he could really feel the extra weight of the car in comparison to his Formula One car, and he sensed that it had a higher polar moment so it didn’t change direction as easily. He also noted that the car did not move around much in comparison with a Formula One car – it didn’t squat much on power and felt more stable. The car was tempting him to run harder through the one fast corner at Firebird, but he didn’t want to push it. He was taking it easy because he didn’t want to run before he could walk.”

  Senna confided his excitement at driving the car to his friend and fellow Brazilian Fittipaldi. He says: “He liked the Penske very much. To my surprise, he said the suspension was quite stiff because he thought it would be softer than in a Formula One car. I could tell he was nervous to be on a new track and in a new car, but he was very enthusiastic about the whole thing. He was enjoying himself and he was very comfortable with the car. When he came into the garage after the first run his eyes were shining like a little boy with a new toy.”

  He may have enjoyed the experience but perhaps he wasn’t being completely truthful with Fittipaldi. He later told his girlfriend Adriane Galisteu that he had not much liked driving the car after Formula One but had found it interesting.

  For his second run, Senna wanted to try something different with the car, so the team softened off the rear springs and rear anti-roll bar to induce understeer. Then he returned to the track for a second time, which Beresford’s run sheets illustrated to be of a greater consistent speed than the first tentative attempt:

  Chassis PC21-04

  Lap 17

  OUT

  Lap 18

  57.48secs

  Lap 19

  53.79secs

  Lap 20

  51.16secs

  Lap 21

  50.20secs

  Lap 22

  49.14secs

  Lap 23

  49.24secs

  Lap 24

  53.83secs

  Lap 25

  49.12secs

  Lap 26

  61.76secs

  Lap 27

  49.25secs

  Lap 28

  IN

  In a total of just 28 laps on the track he had blitzed Fittipaldi’s time by over half a second. And that was it. After just 28 stunning laps he returned to the pits and handed the car back to the team. Beresford says: “He came back into the pits and said, Thank you very much, I’ve learned what I needed to know’. Then he got out of the car and that was that.”

  Fittipaldi says: “He enjoyed it a lot. He said he was quite impressed with the acceleration. He was not happy with the first run – he had some problems with the seat and everything – but on the second run he was very, very quick.”

  Senna returned to Brazil for Christmas, leaving the motor racing world to try and predict where he would race in 1993 as news of the secret test broke. Beresford says: “It would have been stepping backwards for him to come to IndyCars. The
re was a lot of publicity at the time about Mansell’s switch to CART, and it seemed that Senna was interested in finding out what the cars were like. I think he was considering life after Formula One. It might also have been a bargaining tool as he had not properly signed with McLaren for the following year. His run in the car predated Mansell’s first run in an IndyCar by a few days, so there were some in the press who interpreted it as a means of stealing some of Mansell’s thunder, although I didn’t take that very seriously.”

  By early January, many people were convinced that Senna would dump Formula One in favour of CART in 1993. Nigel Mansell, embarking on his own IndyCar career, was questioned by journalists about Senna so many times that there was a distinct note of irritation in his voice at his own first test, when he said: “I don’t care what Senna is doing. He is not part of my life any more and he can do what he likes. I am concentrating on my new job here with my new team and that’s all there is to it.”

  Towards the end of the month, speculation had grown so intense that newspapers were reporting that Senna was ‘widely expected’ to be heading to the States. However, the situation was thrown into further confusion on 27th January when Penske announced Fittipaldi and Tracy as its drivers for 1993. There was no mention of Senna, who kept a low profile, although his spokesman Charles Marzanasco reported that he was still undecided over his options for 1993.